Soul Slam

These days, Andy Noble is best known as the founding bassist of Kings Go Forth, a ten-piece, Milwaukee-based soul orchestra that is currently touring to support its hit début album, “The Outsiders Are Back.” The group came to town not long ago for shows at Mercury Lounge and Southpaw. On his day off, Noble dropped by Good Records NYC, in the East Village, and slipped into his other persona: collector of rare soul and funk music.

Noble, bearded and baby-faced, arranged a stack of 45-r.p.m. records in front of him, as did the store’s owner, Jonathan Sklute, and the two men began what amounted to a friendly joust. Noble, who is thirty-four, went first: he switched on a turntable and played a mid-tempo song from the early seventies by a San Antonio-based soul group led by Charles Russell and his brother Raymond.

“That one’s a real cheapo,” Noble said. “In the seventies, the original was huge, a four-hundred-dollar Northern soul record. Dudes trying to buy copies called Raymond, who produced it, and he just said he’d press it again. The value is low, even though the mix on the new one is better.”

Noble took the record off. Sklute put on “Feel It,” by the Rising Sun, a Florida soul group of Jamaican origin better known for the rare sides “Good Loving” and “One Night Affair.” “ ‘Good Loving’ is a version of ‘One Night Affair’ where the singer makes all these true-love pledges, stuff like ‘I want you to be my wife,’ “ Noble said. “They did the same exact song with different lyrics. It’s ‘I don’t want to love you. All I want is a one-night affair.’ I like the evil version better.”

“ ‘Feel It’ isn’t a great record. I sell it for the sweet side,” Sklute said, indicating the ballad on the back, “Gettin’ Is Kinda Cool Now.” “I always keep it in the store for Jamaican collections.”

“Jamaicans love the sweet side,” Noble said.

Until January, Noble was, in addition to a bandleader and a collector, a record-store owner: for a decade, he ran a shop called Lotus Land, in Milwaukee. “Owning a store is funny, because the things that you display on the walls and the things you’re proud of, well, they’re not necessarily the same things,” he said.

“Those goals can be at odds sometimes,” Sklute said. “I opened in 2005, but we moved to this location right as the economy fell apart. I had to throw out the conventional wisdom, which is that you’re not doing anything unless you’re finding new things. What sustained us was meat and potatoes. And, by meat and potatoes, I mean ‘Thriller,’ mainly.”

Noble laughed. “When Michael Jackson died, it was all about ‘Thriller.’ Every crackhead who brought me a copy of the album—scratched, bent, mangled—was, like, ‘I want fifty bucks,’ “ he said. “I had to have copies on display to show them that, look, this is going for eight bucks and it’s just sitting here. Then they’re, like, ‘All right, give me a buck!’ “

The phone in the store rang. Sklute answered; a customer was looking for a Donny Hathaway concert album. A distinction was quickly established between “In Performance,” from 1980, and “Live!,” from 1972. Sklute hung up and put on another record, “Million Dollar Lady b/w Got to Have It,” by Manutua. “This is pretty nice,” Sklute said. “The flip’s kind of tentative.”

“It’s from Phoenix,” Noble said. “Got to buy that.” (It was priced at about fifty dollars.) “I just got another Phoenix one recently. Not lots of soul records come out of there.”

Since Noble closed Lotus Land, to devote himself to Kings Go Forth, his business has migrated online. But the Internet presents different problems. “It’s so easy to find obscure music now online,” he said. “You can almost get to the cutting edge without owning one record. But it’s a question of your goal. Some people just want to hear the music. They are one-way streets. I see myself totally as a conduit. As soon as I get something good, my main impetus is to share it with as many people as I can.”

Noble performs soul and funk d.j. sets twice a month at a Milwaukee night club called the Mad Planet. “Hundreds of people come,” he said. “The cool people complain that all the assholes are coming to our nights. I say, ‘What do you want? Try to coexist.’ Ultimately, you should be inspired to be seeing assholes engaging in non-asshole behavior.” He pointed at the record on the turntable. “And those guys—the ones with hair gel and graphic-print T-shirts—are the ones who come up afterward and ask about songs,” he said. “I love being involved in something obscure enough that I can always be grabbing a record that people don’t know and blowing their mind, and that also has mass appeal. That’s the beauty of soul and funk music.” ♦

Ben Greenman is the author of ten books, including the novel “The Slippage” and the best-selling memoir “Mo’ Meta Blues” that he co-wrote with Ahmir-Khalib Thompson.